[alnitak]

That was quick! You have arranged by memory rather than CPU....looking down the CPU column nothing is taking any significant %, unless it is off the bottom.

You aren't atcually running very much - Firefox, Internet Explorer too (2 windows as well!), Irfanview, Nvidia control panel I think...I guess the av*.exe is some sort of antivirus. The svchost.exe processes are to run NT services, these are programs that run in the background as soon as you start the computer.

FYI, I am running far more than that on a Pentium 2 300MHZ with 192MB of RAM and response is good even though CPU usage is up at 100% at the moment due to a big WinRAR decode.

Sort by CPU, and tell us what happens to this list when you start one of the programs (and do you HEAR a lot of disk activity?).

I am going to get something to eat now, will be back in an hour or so...

[jdm]

"System Idle Process" is the only entry under "CPU" column which is not zero. "System Idle Process" bounces back and forth between 97 and 99. When I start a program I don't hear any disc activity whatsoever. That's why I'm surprised I have performance issues. Thanks for your help and I hope you enjoyed your lunch!

[jdm]

When I first purchased this computer, the Windows XP screen would last only 5 seconds upon booting (and then the desktop would quickly appear). However, now the XP screen lasts up to 5 minutes when booting, before the desktop is finally shown. Not sure why it's taking so much longer to boot nowadays.